REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS DO CINEMA DE HORROR: UM ESTUDO DE RECEPÇÃO

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze social representations of the horror film in a group of consumers of the genre. The research is motivated by two questions posed by author Noël Carroll (1999) in the book "The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart": how people can be attracted to narratives whose logic is to provoke horror and fear? And why should anyone have fear in this genre, when they know the plot is fictional? For Carroll, the people are interested in the horror stories because they are curious and it is not the plot that they are afraid, but the content generated by thinking about it. The objective is to test these two responses by author – which seem essential to understand the consumption of film horror – in the reception field with a group of potential viewers of the genre. For this objective, we look, in the social networking twitter, for people who showed interested in the cinema of horror. The criterion for selection was that their accounts/profiles were following the account/profile bocadoinferno – whose content is all oriented to the cinema of horror. For the first stage of selection, we considered the age and presenting a personal account at the account/profile: 190 subjects were approached at that stage, questioned if they want to participate. For those who agreed (86 people) were sent a questionnaire trying to find out if these spectators really are interested in the cinema of horror. The 32 individuals who responded were sent another questionnaire to identify how they perceived the gender they consume. Of the 24 respondents, six were selected for a virtual interview. In analyzing the results of data collection was reached three categories of social representation of the subjects about the consumption of horror cinema: a narrative perception, emotion and attraction caused by gender.